I have a bet going with my fiancee that the Heene family, which were behind last week’s absurd balloon incident that is now believed by authorities to have been staged, will in fact achieve their goal and get their own reality show. In the end, this Kafkaesque ordeal involving a UFO-hunting family with an out-of-this-world father is just too golden for the networks to pass up. Aside from my vested interest in having the Heene family achieve fame, I am more interested in how increased competition for fame on the Internet may have led to such an extreme act.
Creative types have largely embraced outgrowths of Web 2.0 such as YouTube, flickr, Twitter, and blog sites that allow them to easily and cheaply reach a broad audience. But as access to a potential audience grows, so does competition for the attention of the masses. While more people now have a crack at getting fame, earning it is not as simple as posting a home-made rap video you shot on a rainy day last weekend.
The Heene family, which appeared twice on the television program “Wife Swap” and have not hidden their desire for fame, seems to have realized this. Despite a slew of YouTube videos posted by its patriarch, the family never achieved widespread acclaim. It appears as if the Heene clan took more drastic measures to gain attention, wasting an generous amount of public and private resources.
If earning notoriety has implicitly become more costly, such that fame-hungry people are willing to risk incarceration and high fines with their stunts (a similar episode occurred in 2007 when Boston residents mistook neon signs advertising a film for terrorist devices), policymakers may need to devise new incentives to keep competition for attention from imposing external costs. For example, rather than throwing traditional penalties at the Heene parents, authorities could bar the couple from appearing in network television programs.
Aside from leading to more drastic actions to achieve fame, information sharing technologies may also be expected to improve the quality of vehicles to fame due to increased competition. A cheap prank by an eccentric family may call that assertion into question, however. In his book, “What Price Fame?,” Tyler Cowen explains that greater visibility can often lower quality; he gives the example of the rise of flashy moves such as slam dunking in basketball have replaced sound fundamentals in the game. As such, increased visibility through Web technologies may indeed mean that there will be plenty of Heene families for years to come.
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